Difference between revisions of "Why Are Women Living Longer Than Men"

Revision as of 14:43, 9 January 2022

Everywhere in the world women live longer than men - but this was not always the case. The available data from rich countries shows that women didn't live longer than men in the 19th century. What makes women live longer than men in the present and why does this benefit increase over time? The evidence is sketchy and we only have limited solutions. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, افضل كريم للشعر (simply click Glorynote) but we don't know exactly how much the influence of each one of these factors is.

In spite of the amount, we can say that at a minimum, the reason why women live longer than men but not in the past, has to have to do with the fact that certain important non-biological aspects have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others are more complex. For example, there is evidence that in rich countries the female advantage increased in part because infectious diseases used to affect women disproportionately a century ago, so advances in medicine that reduced the long-term health burden from infectious diseases, especially for survivors, ended up raising women's longevity disproportionately.

Everywhere in the world women tend to live longer than men
The first chart below shows life expectancy at birth for men and women. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl in every country can anticipate to live longer than her younger brother.

The chart above shows that while the female advantage exists across all countries, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half each year.

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In rich countries the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's examine how the female advantage in terms of longevity has changed over time. The next chart compares the life expectancy of males and females at birth in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two areas stand out.

First, there's an upward trend. Men as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's a widening gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be extremely small but it increased substantially in the past century.

You can verify that these are applicable to other countries that have data by selecting the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.